13 Going on 30

Directed by Gary Winick, 13 Going on 30 follows 13-year-old Jenna Rink (Christa B. Allen) as she wishes she were older and subsequently wakes up in the body of her 30-year-old self (Jennifer Garner). It’s a fairly irresistible setup that’s employed to affable yet distressingly erratic effect by Winick, as the filmmaker, working from Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa’s screenplay, delivers a high-concept comedy that’s ultimately fares best in its brisk and palpably fun opening half hour – with the irresistible emphasis on suddenly-adult Jenna’s fish-out-of-water exploits certainly going a long way towards establishing and perpetuating the compelling atmosphere. (And it doesn’t hurt, certainly, that Garner turns in about as likeable and bubbly a performance as one could possibly have envisioned, with the actress’ top-notch work here matched by an agreeably eclectic supporting cast that includes Mark Ruffalo, Judy Greer, and Andy Serkis.) There’s little doubt, then, that 13 Going on 30 slowly-but-surely begins to run out of steam as the emphasis is (perhaps inevitably) placed on Jenna’s generic, romcom-friendly exploits, including her rivalry with a coworker and her attempts at winning over Ruffalo’s Matt, which ensures that the picture runs out of steam long before arriving at its predictably upbeat, everyone’s-happy conclusion. The end result is a mostly watchable (if entirely forgettable) effort that admittedly does boast its fair share of memorable moments (eg Jenna leads her jaded coworkers in a spirited dance-along to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”), although the movie can’t quite, in the final analysis, live up to the exceedingly entertaining bent of its first act.

**1/2 out of ****